Subscribe to our newsletter by emailTreasures from Special Collections and Archives
A mark of distinction for the UCI Libraries is the range and quality of materials preserved in its Special Collections & Archives. In this edition we highlight a unique gift of a significant collection of artists' books from Catherine Lord.
Catherine Lord, Professor Emerita of Art, generously donated a gift of 131 artists' books to Special Collections and Archives last year. We were thrilled to receive these, as the addition of this material significantly strengthened our collection of artists' books, especially from the formative, early era of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Works from this period are of growing interest to art historians, faculty, students, community scholars and book artists. The collection is extremely valuable and adds greatly to our Artists' Books Collection. Some of the books in the Catherine Lord gift include works by Don Celender, Joan Lyon, Barbara Kruger, Robert Heinecken, Richard Nonas, the Bread and Puppet Theater, Miranda Antoni, Augusto Concato, Thomas Ockerse, and the Guerrilla Girls.
We are actively building a collection of artists' books dating from the 1960s to the present (500 volumes to date, most of them published after 1990) encompassing nearly all aspects of the genre from "normal" published works to altered, sculptural, painted and unique books. The collection currently has three major foci: works by and about women; works that explore contemporary American politics; and works produced in Latin American countries. Other titles in our collection that are particularly outstanding exemplars of the form, but do not fall into the above categories, include numerous illustrated editions of Mallarme's typographic poem, Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard.
Catherine Lord, Professor of Studio Art and affiliated faculty, Department of Women's Studies and Department of Visual Culture, is a writer, artist, and curator whose work addresses issues of feminism, cultural politics, and colonialism. We thank her, again, for this important donation and for her generosity.
For further information about the artists' books collection, please contact Steve MacLeod, Special Collections and Archives Public Services Librarian at 949.824.4967 or smacleod@uci.edu